"There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery"
Rotten quotes
148 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Man is rotten with perfection."
"It’s not what happens to you, but how you handle it. If Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If the lemons are rotten, take out the seeds and plant them in order to grow new lemons."
"I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends."
"Rotten wood cannot be carved."
"Punk and all that was just an image that ripped people off. Johnny Rotten's a wanker, and that's all there is to it."
"There is little choice in a barrel of rotten apples."
"All existing things are really one. We regard those that are beautiful and rare as valuable, and those that are ugly as foul and rotten. The foul and rotten may come to be transformed into what is rare and valuable, and the rare and valuable into what is foul and rotten."
"Their [the Jews] rotten and unbending stiffneckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone."
"Without work all life goes rotten."
"Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit. We must be rooted in Jesus Christ."
"Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn't matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality."
"Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon."
"You won't die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life."
"They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
"Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material."
"The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change."
"Anger is the fruit of rotten roots."
"Second freshness - that's what is nonsense! There is only one freshness - the first - and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten."
"The first Van Halen album makes Johnny Rotten out to be what he really was and still is: a hairdresser."
"New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages."